Community News Archive
Pioneers of nanotechnology scoop Nobel Prize
IOP
9 October 2007
The winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics 2007 have now been announced. This year the award is being shared between two continental physicists for their independent work on Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR). Work on GMR has spurred on the miniaturisation of the hard disk and made every day devices like MP3 players and laptops possible.
In 1988, both Frenchman Albert Fert and German Peter Grünberg independently concluded that weak magnetic changes, which give rise to differences in electrical resistance, could help create a perfect tool for reading data from hard disks. The work was immediately applied to sensitive read-out heads and has been continually advanced ever since, used, perhaps most noticeably, in devices like the iPod.
For more information about GMR
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